Cars 2 Review

So recently for someone’s birthday I went and watched Cars 2 and knowing that the first film is largely considered as the worst of the Pixar Movies I wasn’t overly excited but slightly curious to see what improvements the had made for the sequel, from watching trailers all I really knew was that Cars 2 incorporates a spy theme and also stars Michael Caine, who is one of my favourite British actors, so I did have some small hopes that the sequel would be a good, if not interesting film.

Unfortunately Cars 2 suffers horribly with a largely uninteresting and sometime complicated story, in fact a few days before going to the cinema my mother told me that she had heard somewhere that children had been complaining that the film’s plot was very confusing for them, which I can defiantly understand. The main problem is that Cars 2 tells two completely different stories which are just barely related until the final act, as such during the film the action is constantly switching between story 1 and story 2, and while the spy thriller storyline takes up the majority of the plot it becomes quite difficult to become engrossed into it when suddenly the movie switches to the racing competition storyline. In fact the racing parts of the film became quickly uninteresting largely because they were almost identical, Lightning Mqueen gets a very insults and then he races and after seeing that 3 times its nothing special, however the last race of the film does pick up when the two story elements combine but its annoying that it took that long for me to become interesting in what Lightning Mqueen is doing as he was the central character of the first film.

The spy storyline is interesting and in some places quite well done but I notice that a lot of the story elements were things that kids are unlikely to understand, petrol prices is a large part of the film’s plot as is a the concept of a lemon (a car in constant need of repair) and as these were things that I didn’t really care about I kept asking my self what kind of mechanic child is watching this film. The film did open with some type of environmental message but this was something that was quickly forgotten and only mentioned once or twice during the rest of the film. If you liked the first film go check out the sequel, but if your one of the MANY who believe Cars to be the worst of the Pixar films maybe give this a miss until it is show at Christmas sometime in the future.

6.5/10 – has its moments but is severely hindered by an uninteresting and often confusing story.

p.s. looking out for Bruce Campbell who unfortunately only gets 5 or so minutes of screen time.